Критик Роджер Льюис описывает голос Ричарда Бёртона как величайший звук XX века

This is pretty silly, but it amused me, and it will perhaps amuse the Persons of Welshness among us. From Frances Wilson’s NYRB review (March 21, 2024; archived) of Erotic Vagrancy: Everything About Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor by Roger Lewis: Lewis finds Burton in his voice, which Burton himself described as “the deep, dark answer” to the Welsh valleys. “I think our voices were born with coal-dust and rain and some sort of authentic mystery from those dark and tortured valleys,” he told an interviewer in 1974. For Lewis, Burton’s voice is “one of the twentieth century’s great noises,” roaring, swelling, delicate and bombastic by turns, the articulation and diction very precise—and it’s what I hold most dear, what I find most engaging, about him, too, the inflections, nuances, elaborations and grain of his voice, the fire and the flint of things spoken. Everything one would want to know with Burton is present in the voice, which was rich and artificial, carrying a sense of fracture, of mournfulness. Welsh was Burton’s first language, and it took years of elocution to iron out his vowels. “Unless you are Welsh,” he said of his friend Stanley Baker, “you couldn’t possibly understand him,” and the same is true of Burton. “He suffers from this intoxication with words,” Taylor said. “It’s Welsh verbal diarrhea.” “The Welsh are supreme at being actors and actresses,” explains Lewis, “because flamboyance is suppressed; it is the guilty secret, which bursts out now and again in lunatic ways, quick and fierce.” I’d never heard of Lewis, and I can’t say I’m pleased to have made his acquaintance; from the review: The Roger Lewis persona is an amalgam of music hall tradition, pantomime, and Restoration bawdy. It is a niche joke about an irate dinosaur Welshman doing battle with the London literati, which may not translate for an American readership. Feeding off what Dr. Johnson called the “buzz” of the theater, the role Lewis assumes in all his books is Embattled Everyman. His petty grievances, aired in Seasonal Suicide Notes, are legion: despite his brash and boastful performance pieces—The Life and Death of Peter Sellers (1994), Anthony Burgess (2003), and The Real Life of Laurence Olivier (2007)—Lewis has been turned down four times as a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. “So there we are: I am officially the least recognised and most non-esteemed author in Britain, perhaps in Britain’s literary history going back to Chaucer and to The Mabinogion.” Sorry, Roger, no esteem from me! The book sounds like complete piffle.